Death through Suture | NY Arts
Death through Suture – Eduarda de Souza
In an inexplicable and continuously violent world where men make history through wars and count them as statistics, Rosana Palazyan has been showing us, for almost two decades, that “God lives in the details.” No statistics for her, deaths are as they should be; a loss or a salvation of a human soul. Praise for this meticulous, disciplined, laborious, demanding and courageous artist, who, like her contemporary Leonilson, has been embroidering mainly to produce a cure.
Rosana attended the School of Visual Arts of Park Lage, the most prominent one in Rio de Janeiro at the time. This was the early 90s and the epoch where the “80s Generation,” which included artists such as Beatriz Milhazes, Adriana Varejão, Daniel Senise, Leda Catunda and Luiz Zerbini, were still being nurtured by the success of their large-scale paintings, a format which, consequently, still reigned at the time. “Painting was a sacrifice for me,” Rosana has famously declared.
The complex duty of being alive brought her the answer: an exhibition which the artist attended in her own school with works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, a Brazilian artist who has been inserted in an exclusive context due to his mental sanity and which, for some, overcame the prejudice which marks the boundary between insanity and art. “If he can do it, why can’t I?” questioned Rosana.
Like Rosário, the artist began reintegrating her universe and that of others through embroidery and, most unforgettably, through the use of memory. Enveloped by family history and religion, what is most remarkable is how Rosana, who exercises her creativity not only through embroidery (which she began working with in the turn of the 20th century), but with photography, writing, drawings, installations and public art, maintains her identity by exposing so much of herself. Another of her major concerns is the area in which she exhibits her works.
If distance means subtlety and kindness, as philosophy masters such as Deleuze have defined it through the decades, then nothing is more apt to describe Rosana’s work than Leonilson’s piece. One can label Rosana’s work as provincial but, like Brazilian artist Marepe, she presents her beloved city, Rio de Janeiro, to the world, conquering complicity and value, succeeding with her “poetic violence.” Amongst her many assets lies her capacity to deal thematically and technically with the subject matter of childhood, adding color to her drawings and embroideries with blood, acrylic paint, aquarelles, different colored threads or other unusual materials from which she extracts colour, such as the natural pigments of flowers.
Today the artist returns to São Paulo after a major retrospective presented at CCBB (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil) and her participation in the 26th São Paulo Biennial with a solo exhibit at Galeria Leme, which represents her art. The show displays her delicate pieces in juxtaposition with the monumental architecture of Leme, erected by the renowned Paulo Mendes da Rocha. As always, a dialogue is created between her art pieces and the architectural space they inhabit. The show brings the experimental field of art into an encounter with the Other as allied with the natures of personal interchanges and transformations.
Rosana will create a site-specific work at Leme where, besides experimenting with sound and audience interaction, she will re-encounter embroidery in her artistic production. Since Palazyan has not worked with this medium for the last five years, it will now be presented in a less explicit form, revealing a new form of subtlety in her art.
Rosana attended the School of Visual Arts of Park Lage, the most prominent one in Rio de Janeiro at the time. This was the early 90s and the epoch where the “80s Generation,” which included artists such as Beatriz Milhazes, Adriana Varejão, Daniel Senise, Leda Catunda and Luiz Zerbini, were still being nurtured by the success of their large-scale paintings, a format which, consequently, still reigned at the time. “Painting was a sacrifice for me,” Rosana has famously declared.
The complex duty of being alive brought her the answer: an exhibition which the artist attended in her own school with works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, a Brazilian artist who has been inserted in an exclusive context due to his mental sanity and which, for some, overcame the prejudice which marks the boundary between insanity and art. “If he can do it, why can’t I?” questioned Rosana.
Like Rosário, the artist began reintegrating her universe and that of others through embroidery and, most unforgettably, through the use of memory. Enveloped by family history and religion, what is most remarkable is how Rosana, who exercises her creativity not only through embroidery (which she began working with in the turn of the 20th century), but with photography, writing, drawings, installations and public art, maintains her identity by exposing so much of herself. Another of her major concerns is the area in which she exhibits her works.
If distance means subtlety and kindness, as philosophy masters such as Deleuze have defined it through the decades, then nothing is more apt to describe Rosana’s work than Leonilson’s piece. One can label Rosana’s work as provincial but, like Brazilian artist Marepe, she presents her beloved city, Rio de Janeiro, to the world, conquering complicity and value, succeeding with her “poetic violence.” Amongst her many assets lies her capacity to deal thematically and technically with the subject matter of childhood, adding color to her drawings and embroideries with blood, acrylic paint, aquarelles, different colored threads or other unusual materials from which she extracts colour, such as the natural pigments of flowers.
Today the artist returns to São Paulo after a major retrospective presented at CCBB (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil) and her participation in the 26th São Paulo Biennial with a solo exhibit at Galeria Leme, which represents her art. The show displays her delicate pieces in juxtaposition with the monumental architecture of Leme, erected by the renowned Paulo Mendes da Rocha. As always, a dialogue is created between her art pieces and the architectural space they inhabit. The show brings the experimental field of art into an encounter with the Other as allied with the natures of personal interchanges and transformations.
Rosana will create a site-specific work at Leme where, besides experimenting with sound and audience interaction, she will re-encounter embroidery in her artistic production. Since Palazyan has not worked with this medium for the last five years, it will now be presented in a less explicit form, revealing a new form of subtlety in her art.
http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=3804
Rosana Palazyan - Museo Rufino Tamayo | Art Nexus
 |
| First Communion Memories/Wood, embroidered saten with golden thread |
Rosana Palazyán
ArtNexus #40 - Arte en Colombia #86
May - Jul 2001
Mexico City, Mexico
| Institution: |
| Museo Rufino Tamayo |
| Luz María Sepulveda |
Museo Rufino Tamayo
Generally speaking, scenes of domestic violence are great fodder for sensationalist publications. The rich content of sickness, lust, and vice frame the headlines: a family man tortures his children and beats his wife; the drunken father kills his wife in a jealous rage and then takes his own life; or the estranged mother, desperate in her loneliness, puts out a cigarette on her baby’s back because he wouldn’t stop crying. These crude episodes of daily life disgust us, but at the same time are attractive in their fatidic violence.
Rosana Palazyan (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) portrays different scenes in which the common denominator is child abuse (of boys and girls, as it’s said in Vicente Fox’s democratic administration). Children who’ve been deceived, persuaded, beaten, raped, and even dismembered constitute the Brazilian artist’s iconographic imagery, though she confronts the spectator with an aura of apparent purity and innocence.
I’m referring particularly to the technique Palazyan has chosen to elaborate her harsh pieces: delicate cotton and nylon embroidery raised on cotton, silk, or satin. The images the artist embroiders on the fabric appear as comic book strips, with no particularly scary detail coming to our attention. When spectators realize that they must read the icons, they also realize they have become accomplices in a terrifying narration in which the child’s fatal destiny is an ineludible and irremediable constant.
In the installation Cajita de música (Music Box), we enter a white room surrounded by a light pink ribbon decorating the wall like decorative trimming, interrupted only by a few decorative windows. While we wind a music box that plays a lullaby, we enter into a heart-wrenching story of a little girl who’s born, breastfed by her mother, becomes a toddler, sleeps, is beaten, raped, and then impregnated, all the while her father drinks from a bottle, at first only watching from the side and then becoming the protagonist in this infernal scene of incest. In the next room we see three small-scale models of pinball machines portraying different stories in which, once more, children are the victims of the grownups’ authoritarian abuse. In the first two, the children die in a shootout. The third machine narrates the episodes of a group of children who go to school, play, and then, for some reason are called by the principal, who reprimands, punishes, beats, rapes, and then kills them.
Before we enter the third room, a monitor shows a video of other pieces by Palazyan. In it, we see more closely at the laborious process of raised embroidery. We also see samples of previous works by the artist, such as children handkerchiefs and underwear alluding once more the topic of violence. In other samples, rag dummies mount the episodes of a family fight as if they were part of a model for a theater presentation. The last installation is titled Recuerdos de primera comunión (First Communion Memories). A satin sheet placed on the floor leads to a kneeling stool padded with fabric and is embroidered with raw stories of a little boy raped by the priest who teaches him catechism. The boy’s parents diligently deliver him to the priest. After indoctrinating and teaching him, the priest assaults and rapes the child. Then he returns him to his parents, who, unaware of their son’s tragedy, thank the priest for the day’s lesson.
The technique of embroidery was rescued from the domestic environment and was embraced as a valid form of high art during the mid-1970s. It has, nevertheless, always been considered a “feminine” technique, and its laboriousness is confined to the representation of decorative elements. The strength in Palazyan’s works is not limited to her exquisite skills in embroidery, but also in the way she decontextualizes the apparently ornamental motifs with hair-raising contents.
Luz Maria Sepulveda
http://www.artnexus.com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=5275
Subscrever:
Mensagens (Atom)